Index Card Glory & The OSR

I’ve said before that my favorite post about the OSR is this one. The simplicity and necessity of using the simple 3X5 card to record character information cannot be overstated. When I started playing again, I went out and bought a pile of these cards to use. I keep them stacked on my wife’s folding wooden secretary desk and, as I pass them on the way to our kitchen, I see them and I smile. The limitless possibilities of great D&D emanate from them like a strange and fascinating light.

The point of OD&D is not to “play the whole game” while going character generation. Instead, it’s to “create” the character while playing the game itself. The characters are not supposed to be fully formed at the onset of the game. There’s no “adventure” in that. Instead, the characters are shaped by the experiences they undergo, the luck they have, and the choices they make in the course of actual play. The simple, small 3X5 card is emblematic of the “blank slate” for starting players that the game demands. Character is forged by events – not solely by wishes, hopes, and desires.

D&D started to get off the right track when it ceded power to the players – and let them design their own characters from whole cloth at the start of the game. The profusion of classes, races, skills (ugh!), and then – gods help us! – “feats,” lead to character generation that took longer than an adventure. Rather than being the creators of individual worlds, the DMs became mere facilitators for the grandiose, elaborate characters created by the players. By having this much power over character creation, the players began to supersede the DM’s powers. They gained enough power to dictate everything they wanted to about their character – in effect becoming little DMs themselves. This meant, logically, that the players ceased to be true players and the DMs ceased to be true DMs. And, unsurprising, D&D ceased to be true D&D!

I totally reject this whole approach. I want the true “blank slate” experience. Dump the players into a world they have little-to-no (mostly no) prior knowledge of and let them struggle to create a character through the random events, exploration, and the adventures that ensue. This is real D&D. Everything else is an attempt to get around the very basics themselves. There are no short cuts to great characters.

“The essence of truth is the truth of essence.”

– Martin Heidegger

The tiny, clean, simple quality of the 3X5 card sums up the whole OSR approach in a nutshell – and from these tiny acorns mighty oaks can grow. Their simplicity is the simplicity of the game in its essence – and it’s that essence the OSR rediscovered when it stripped away all the layers of needless complexities and purposeless changes that had accrued to D&D over the years. When you’re starting with the 3X5 card, you know you’re back at the basics – right along with the original three booklets – and the horizons are all wide open.

Are their exceptions? Sure. Larger index cards are fine too. I’ve got some and you can see some of them in that photo.

I am also fond of the custom S&W 3X5:

That cuts it down to the essentials and, as a bonus, incorporates and retains the iconic 3X5 – with all its red and blue lines – directly onto the card itself.

I’d also love to go to a talented forger/counterfeiter and ask them to make me up some perfect duplicates of these, the original (and now very, very pricey) Judges Guild “Character Chronicle Cards”:

Quotations…

“In the sharing of fun and hobbies, the true meaning of friendship most often manifests itself”

– David A. Hargrave

"Take my word for it, there is no such thing as an ancient village, especially if it has seen better days, unillustrated by its legends of terror. You might as well expect to find a decayed cheese without mites, or an old house without rats, as an antique and dilapidated town without an authentic population of goblins."

- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

"And if you've got no other choice
You know you can follow my voice
Through the dark turns and noise
Of this wicked little town"

- John Cameron Mitchell

“We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”

- C.S. Lewis

"Games were all that made things serious or gave them form. To be a serious person, it was necessary to embrace one."

- Robert Stone

"Maturity consists in having rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.”

- Carl Jung

"Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth."

- Jean-Paul Sartre

"Wilderlands taught me how to make and run a good sandbox setting. Arduin taught me how to not limit my imagination."

- Illés Tamás

“Even if you have no intention to ‘do magic’ when you play D&D, you are immersing yourself in an alien, magic worldview which can gradually change the way you think about life and spiritual matters.”

- Bill Schnoebelen

"Not far away were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people."